Dogs and Shoes

Getting Women to Speak at Your Conference is Hard. So?

Ok, so you love tech, or some aspect of it, and you decide to throw a conference to gather like-minded tech-lovers and people who want to learn from them. Maybe you want to make money from your event, maybe not--whatever. Maybe you’re doing this on your own, or maybe you’re working with an organization—again, whatever. You secure a space, you invite people to speak, you throw open registration. It feels good.

And then people start to point out that nearly all of your speakers are men. Or perhaps 100% of your speakers are men. Even if your event has a focus on women, somebody might mention that nearly all of your speakers are white. 

Now, you don't want to appear sexist or racist (bonus points if you don’t want to be sexist or racist). So you take a look at how you arrived at your speaker roster, and you realize that no women applied to speak, and you can't think of a single black programmer or CEO to invite. Thank god--it's not really your fault that white guys are over-represented on your program! You pretty much had no choice!

I’ve employed that tempting, crappy logic myself, and I’ve got a secret to share: Getting women and other under-represented groups to speak at your tech event is hard. Now here's something to think about: So?

You didn't get into tech because you hate solving problems. Indeed, having a "hard problem" to solve is considered an enticement in job descriptions for engineers, designers and tech businesspeople.

Which is where this conference thing gets interesting. Rather than throw up your hands and say it’s the nature of the business, you can embrace this challenge. You can read about what other people have done in this realm, and you can apply your considerable problem-solving skills to come up with new solutions that will benefit us all.

Of course, you can try to ignore the problem. You cannot, however, claim to have tried but failed ("the call for speakers was open, but no women applied") or pretend that the issue is intractable ("there aren't any black programmers or CEOs") and expect everyone to accept that. Think about it like test-driven development. When your test of the login form fails, you don’t delete the test. You fix the code.

For test-driven conference development, consider these three tests necessary as you create your program: 1) Are the speakers good communicators? 2) Are they going to cover topics relevant to your audience? 3) Do they reflect your community—beyond the people you know personally—or even have the potential to enhance your community? Either all of your tests pass or you find, debug, and fix the failing ones; you don't want women who give lousy presentations.

Here are some bugs you’re likely to encounter:

• When you brainstorm speakers, you don’t come up with any women or people of color who are knowledgeable about your topics.
• You want prominent people on the stage, and you can’t think of any women or people of color who are big names. Except maybe Sheryl Sandberg, and you don’t know how to reach her anyway.
• You have a call for proposals or a call for speakers, and very few or no women or people of color apply.
• Your call for proposals allows folks to suggest panels, and none of the suggested panelists are women or people of color.
• You invite some women, and they all say no.
• You get some women and people of color on the program, and then they all cancel.
• The bigger your event, the harder it will be to acheive any sort of parity.

By now you’re probably wondering why, given all these bugs, you should care whether you appear sexist or racist. I've talked about that before; many others have done it better. What I'm really interested in today is new approaches that you--because you're smart and resourceful and creative--will come up with for solving these problems. 

So this isn’t a post about how you tackle the issue or even why you should; this is a post challenging you to try. I will readily acknowledge that your initial approaches will likely be imperfect and slow and socially uncomfortable. That's why this is a hard problem. I’m excited to hear your solutions.

--

A few notes on comments:

1) I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness. 

2)  Remember, this is not a post about why speaker diversity is important. That’s not a debate we’re entertaining today, so save those comments for another time (or for 4chan or whatever).

Presto: Kale Pesto

The title of this post pretty much says it all: kale--raw kale--makes for a great pesto. It's yummy, easy to whip up, a lovely green and surprisingly flexible. It's great to make when it's too hot to really cook, or when you're feeling a little lazy, or when you want vegetables in a form that doesn't involve chewing. It stores well, too, so it's good way to use up a bunch of greens that are going to turn the corner soon, even if you don't plan on eating them right away. 

I came up with this kale magic on my very own, and then later realized lots of other folks, including 101 Cookbooks and Love & Lemons, have posted super-similar recipes with far nicer pictures. I think for some of us, a bunch of greens, a Cuisinart and 15 minutes in a row just shouts, "Kale pesto!"

Anyway, here's the recipe, which takes 15 - 20 minutes, including cleanup, and makes 1 - 2 cups of pesto (or enough for at least pasta for four):

• A handful (maybe 1/2 cup) any kind of nuts, toasted. Walnuts, pinenuts, almonds, pecans are all good candidates, but feel free to use whatever you have on hand.
• A clove of garlic, roughly chopped.
• A sprinkle of salt.
• 1 bunch any kind of kale; washed, dried and very loosely chopped (or loosely chop it and then wash and dry in a salad spinner);  don't tell anyone, but I don't bother to remove the stems. This recipe also works nicely with arugula, baby collards, swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens and their friends. It even works with asparagus and snap peas.
• Olive oil--maybe 1/3 cup.
• Juice of a half lemon, plus zest of the whole lemon.
• About 1/2  cup or so grated parmesan (or one of its cousins--asiago, pecorino romano, etc); optional.

Into a food processor, toss the nuts, garlic and a little salt. Whir it briefly to get a grainy paste, then throw in the kale. While the greens are twirling their way down, slowly pour in a little olive oil to make it creamy, and then add a splash of lemon juice and the lemon zest. At this point, you can add grated parmesan into the mix, or you can leave that out for a vegan/freezable version. Taste and adjust salt/lemon/olive oil as needed. Presto: pesto.

Bonus for lethargy over-acheivers: If you're adding grated cheese, you can pulse it in the food processor before you start everything else (remove it before the first step above, and then add it back in at the end, or it all gets a bit gunky). Although the food processor turns hard cheese into tiny pebbles, rather than ethereal flakes, it's tough to notice that in a pesto, and this method saves you from having to wash the grater.

Bonus for actual over-acheivers and people who find raw greens to be bitter: you could blanch the greens first to leach out the bitterness and then proceed. I don't taste the bitter note in greens, so I never do this. 

Here's what you can do with this pesto:

* Have it over pasta--regular or whole wheat or whatever--or over polenta or over rice. Include some steamed or sauteed veggies, or not. Serve with parmesan or one of its cousins. (If you serve it over pasta, scoop out a little pasta water, maybe 1/2 cup, to drizzle over the pesto/pasta combo and make it creamier.)

* Make it the basis of the dressing for a white bean and/or chickpea salad and/or grain salad (try white wine vinegar or more lemon here).

* Slather it on toasted bread with slices of tofu or cheese or a handful of white beans.

* Add dollops of it to a plain frittata, as shown here, or an omelette. 

* Serve it as a crudite dip.

* Freeze it and use it later. Real recipe writers always say that things like, "Pesto lasts for up to a month frozen." I have tested those limits and found that pesto will go six months, really no prob. 

* If you want to store it in the fridge--where it will last happily for about a week, give or take--put it in a container, and then slick the top with olive oil, which will keep it nice and green.

I Am George Zimmerman

In the weeks since Trayvon Martin’s execution, we’ve seen many, many people of color identifying with Trayvon and his parents, speaking up about the pain and danger of living in a country where there’s widespread perception that brown skin is threatening.

Here’s what we haven’t seen: a lot of white people examining their own perceptions about brown skin. 

Given that much of the discussion so far has focused on the history and patterns of racism that Trayvon’s death appears to fit into--and that a lot of us white folks have decried those patterns--it’s striking that so many people have come forward to identify with Martin and so few with George Zimmerman. If we aren’t the ones perpetuating racism, who is?

It would be easy here to say that old-school Southern whites, white cops, white gun proponents and Geraldo Rivera fans (not to mention white people who own hoodie companies) are the ones responsible for a toxic environment. Indeed, if we’re to be anti-racist allies, it’s important that we recognize whites’ racist behaviors and that we call them out.

But by presuming that they--including Zimmerman, and the cops who failed to arrest him, and the legislators and NRA/ALEC supporters who championed “Stand Your Ground”-- are some other, evil brand of white people, those of us who say we want a truly equitable society miss the opportunity to look at ourselves and see how our behaviors contribute to a world where few are surprised when an unarmed child is killed on a residential street.

It’s uncomfortable to consider, but it’s not just the other white people whose attitudes and actions draw forward the American legacy of racism.

Personally, I gained a nice sense of self-satisfaction by joining a lot of other people, white and of color, in condemning Zimmerman’s apparent racism and the laws and police behavior that backed him up. After all, I don’t own a gun, I’m generally suspicious of police, I wouldn’t vote for a politician who supported pro-gun or SYG laws. I mean, c’mon, I give money to incredible organizations that fight for equal justice. I prefer a racially diverse Hunger Games! I tweeted about Doug Shipman’s terrific TEDx talk on community and diversity--which I found because I follow black men on Twitter! I’m. A. Good. Person. A good white person, at that.

And yet, as Tim Wise pointed out this past Sunday on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, the research on hidden bias reveals that we all, regardless of skin color, carry innate biases. Whether we become aware of them is often a matter of privilege. How we choose to act is another question altogether.

So there I was a few evenings ago, in a part of my neighborhood that’s pretty far from the trains and the cute shops, on a block near the BQE that has some well-maintained buildings but also a handful of empty lots and abandoned buildings. I was with a lost dog that some other neighbors had found wandering on its own earlier in the day, and I was asking around, looking for its people. Miraculously, I found the owners--which meant that I was walking home alone at dusk.

I had my phone out to text a neighbor about the dog. It’s a new phone, about two weeks old, flat and flashy. As I leaned on a building to type, a young black man walked by me. I noticed that he was a lot bigger than I am and that he was wearing a hoodie. Here’s what I thought: he could have been Trayvon. And then: oh, there’s been a rash of phone thefts in the neighborhood. And then I put my phone in my pocket until he passed. Two minutes earlier, when a young white woman in a hoodie had passed, I thought: cute shoes! And I continued texting. (NB: Although I’ve read that Fort Greene has had a mini-epidemic of phone thefts, I haven’t read a word describing the thieves.)

A quiz: In a mixed-race, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood at 6p in the evening, with a bunch of people of all kinds around, who feels safer on the street: the 40-something white woman or the 20-something black man?

Ok, ok, false dichotomy, trick question. Everyone needs to stay aware and stay safe, yadda yadda. Point is, if we’re paying attention to Trayvon’s death, rather than to, say, The Wire, we could reasonably conclude that the young black man was not a phone thief or any kind of predator and that he might have felt threatened by my likely ability to draw sympathy from nearby cops (if he’d noticed me at all, which, honestly, I have no idea--but narcissism being what it is, I’m going to go with his having been aware of me).

It was the smallest of interactions, which means this isn’t a big risk for me to admit, but in it, I could have been the George Zimmerman.

Now I’m wondering: What are the more significant interactions where I overinterpret race, and how else can I behave?

--

I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this blog. Seeing as the internet tends to draw vile comments on race, however, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.  

 

It's Impossible to Stop Eating This

When I was in college and learning to cook, I became enamored of a Craig Claibourne recipe for colcannon--a traditional Irish dish that mixes potatoes and kale or cabbage. I hadn't grown up eating colcannon, I didn't use that particular cookbook very much, and this was in the years before I considered establishing a religion based on kale, so I'm not sure how I even hit on the recipe. But I'm guessing I was trying to use up some potatoes, and Claibourne's short write-up appealed to me because it had just seven ingredients, including salt and pepper, and it looked easy.

"Easy" undersells the virtues of this creation. Not only can you make it with the skills you'll have acquired by the second time you've attempted to cook, it's forgiving and versatile. If you boil the potatoes too long, no problem. If you undercook the kale, nobody gets hurt. If you don't feel like peeling the potatoes, totally fine. If you use sweet potatoes (or yellow potatoes, or even rutabagas) instead of white potatoes, all to the good. If you don't have milk on hand,  or if you're vegan, you can just substitute in the potato cooking water (I probably don't need to mention that vegans can swap in olive oil for the butter). If you toss in cabbage instead of kale, you've just made "bubble and squeak"--the English version of this dish, which ought to win a prize for delightful names. You can profitably throw in tofu, and I've seen colcannon recipes that include pork.

Here's the other great thing about this recipe: it uses ingredients you can get at the farmers' market far into the winter. And those ingredients are usually pretty cheap.

Oh, and also? It's delicious. Impossible-to-stop-eating delicious. Claibourne's recipe says it serves six. Presumably, that's six people with no taste buds. 

So for all of these reasons, I started making colcannon regularly--very, very regularly. I tried other recipes, but most didn't include Claibourne's baking step, which produces a lovely crust. I always reverted back to his. 

And then I lost track of the idea. I joined a CSA and started sauteing kale or eating it raw.  My potatoes wound up in Spanish tortillas. I moved for a while to an apartment with an iffy oven. I forgot about colcannon. For almost 20 years.

But earlier tonight, facing a big bunch of collard-like "winter greens" I'd found at the farmers' market last weekend and wanting comfort food after five days of a nasty cold, I remembered the recipe. I didn't have the cookbook anymore, but Google Books turned up the page exactly as I remembered it, minus a few stains.

I used what I had on hand: a mix of sweet and white potatoes, the unidentified greens, potato water instead of milk, extra onions because they're yummy, and, fittingly, Kerrygold Irish butter. I microwaved the greens instead of boiling them, but other than that, I followed the recipe.

It was as amazingly gratifying and yummy as I remembered it. The only change I'd make: if I were re-writing the recipe, I might mention that under certain circumstances, it serves just one. 

 

Presents Tense

A long-standing tension in our household is that I believe we should spend about $50 apiece on Christmas presents for each other, buying and making maybe one or two things, and then additionally making a donation somewhere in the other person's name. Tony, on the other hand, believes "we each must have at least ten store-bought presents under the tree on Christmas morning, including the dog; no price limits!"

Nevermind that I am Jewish, had never once celebrated Christmas until we got together seven years ago and can't remember whether Christmas morning is December 23, 24, 25 or 26. There! Must! Be! Presents! 

To be fair, Tony really does love giving and getting a lot of presents, and he's very cute in his pajamas, sitting under a dead tree in a sea of withered wrapping paper that I've been re-using since college. And so, by the time we were four years in, we'd had a series of much-anticipated, terribly expensive and totally pleasant gift exchanges. But the best present we could remember--very nearly the only present we could remember--was a rope toy the size of Tony's head that Eggs really loved. It shed little bits of red and navy blue thread throughout our house until we moved in 2010. 

Thus, two years ago,  as a mechanism for fostering creativity and thoughtfulness (not to mention prudence), we imposed a spending cap. I don't remember the amount, and it's not important. Point is: on Christmas morning, it was revealed that we'd both stopped keeping track of how much we'd spent after having blown through the putative limit halfway through buying a houseload of utterly forgettable stuff. It's a miracle neither of us has been elected to the U.S. Senate yet. 

So last year, we took another tack...and it worked beautifully. I don't remember how we came up with the idea, but here's the deal: we created five categories, and we both had to buy the other person a present in each category, plus one present for the dog. This system provided just enough stuff to make Tony happy and just enough constraint to please me, too. 

Our categories were:

* Something to read
* Something to wear
* Something to do
* Something for the apartment
* Something romantic

If you approach things creatively,  it's not hard to wind up with ten presents each. Mittens, for instance, can be wrapped separately. And we have two apts, so that category is extensible (lest you picture extravagance, they are both small rentals--one with no heat, the other where we discovered that Eggs does not chase mice).

This year, we might consider other categories. For example:

* Something philanthropic
* Something home-made
* Something used
* Something electronic
* Something serial
* Something to listen to
* Something to watch
* Something to eat 
* Something to build
* Something to grow
* Something to play with
* Something that smells great
* Something not from China 

Any good categories we're missing? And any totally fucking indestructible dog toys you'd recommend? If it has stuffing, it does not qualify. 

Looking forward to Christmas morning this year! Whichever day it turns out to be.

Giddyup, Cowboy

 
Great news: the neighborhood couple who fostered Cowboy last week are keeping him. They thought about it really carefully, which you like to see. But he's such a sweetheart, and so trainable, one imagines it wasn't an excrutiating decision.

The silver lining to this already-shiny situation is that I get to be, like, a dog aunt. The couple is away this weekend, so Cowboy is staying with me. And after they get back, he'll spend some weekdays here when they're both going to be out all day. In other words: I'm the big winner here.

Overall, fostering has been an interesting experience. I got to connect with a great dog, I met a bunch of terrific people in the neighborhood, and I got a little smarter about posting this sort of thing online. Would definitely buy again. A++++++++. 

Cowboy Needs a Home

Update (August 31): A neighborhood couple came to meet Cowboy last night and wound up rolling all over the floor with him. They want to get to know him better, and they're going to foster him next week. Meantime, I'd love to hear from others who might be interested if these folks decide they can't adopt a dog right now. 

In related news, I was heartened by Cowboy's reception in Ft Greene Park this morning. This post has been hit hundreds of times, and everyone seemed to know about him. Amanda, a dog owner, brought an "Adopt Me" vest for him, and Cowboy got a ton of great atttention. Between the vest and the fact that I've gotten a little smarter about linking pictures to this post, I'm hopeful he'll meet his forever people soon. Please continue to help  spreading the word. Thanks!

The facts, as I know 'em:

This sweet male pit bull, approximately two years old, was found tied up and abandoned in Fort Greene Park about a month ago. A park regular, Sarah, who already has a young male mutt, took this guy in and named him Cowboy. He's housebroken, and the dogs got along famously. But it was insane having them wrestle constantly in her small apt, and she finally decided to she had to give up Cowboy. We're trying to find him a forever home. (Confusing, but not unmanageably so: I'm also named Sarah.)

During the time she had Cowboy, Sarah took him to Brooklyn Veterinary Hospital, where he was neutered and got all of his shots, along with flea-and-tick treatment and heartworm meds. The vet said he seemed very healthy and showed no signs of abuse. But Cowboy weighed 60 pounds, and the vet to wondered if he'd simply outgrown a loving home. (He is, btw, a very compact 60 pounds, looking more like 50.)

Sarah says that in the time she had him, Cowboy never displayed any aggression toward other dogs or people. He even spent a night or two with a co-worker of hers who has a one-year-old and a four-year-old; he was great with the kids, and they fell in love with him. (We don't know how Cowboy is with cats.) Sarah, btw, seems very sane and trustworthy--which, she and I both had to admit, is not universally true of dog people.

Because I've been in the market for a foster dog for the past few weeks, I have met a lot of abandoned pit bulls. Nearly all of them have had the pretty intense behavior issues that come with being mistreated. They're needy. They're leash-aggressive. They're food-aggressive. Or they're afraid to eat. They're very easily spooked. They're afraid of men. Or they're afraid of women. They have separation anxiety. They're barkers. They don't get along with other dogs. Cowboy, I'm surprised to report, seems to have none of these issues. He's young and energetic, but he appears very well adjusted. He bonds with people quickly (even on our first walk, he checked in and looked me in the eye several times); he wants to learn (he loved clicker training for his dinner and wasn't spooked by the clicking noise); and he's generally not anxious (he started playing with toys the instant he got in my apartment, and neither the subway rumble nor my moving around has bothered him at all).

Here's what is tricky with Cowboy: walking on leash. He's not aggressive: no lunging, no growling, no barking. He doesn't react when other dogs on leash get testy. But his general mode is to walk quickly and pull very hard. Even with the front-clasp harness, it's an intense experience. Sarah says that two dog walkers she's had both found him manageable, so I'm going to see if I can learn some better techniques. Meantime, I want to be honest about this.

In addition, he doesn't have a lot of manners. While he hasn't tried to get on my sofa, he does like to jam through doors first, and he does some mild jumping up on people. But I think that stuff is very solveable. He seems to like training, and I don't think he's gotten much of it yet; "sit" is still shaky for him.

I wound up with Cowboy because Fort Greene PUPS sent a note around today saying that they'd been unable to find him a forever home, and Sarah was taking him to Animal Control; if anyone could adopt him, he'd be there. I responded, saying I could foster him. As it happens, Sarah's mom was already at Animal Control, where the intake guy was asking her to reconsider leaving the dog. The agency puts down thousands of dogs each year, and pit bulls are particularly vulnerable, rarely getting adopted back out. PUPS connected me and Sarah, and then Sarah called her mom right as Animal Control was suggesting she keep looking for a new owner.

Now, Tony and I already have a dog, Eggs. But the two of them are spending most of the fall in SF, while I'm spending it in Bklyn. So I'm considering adopting an East Coast dog. But  because I have a fair amount of travel through October, I'm not quite ready to commit. Thus the foster idea. And thus the need to find Cowboy a forever home. More pics of Cowboy are here.

If you're Cowboy's potential new home, feel free to email me directly. If you can help spread this post with tweets and Facebook updates, that's much appreciated, too. Cowboy will make a great dog for a great home, but he needs help making the match.

 

The DIY Treadmill Desk

 
Ever since learning about treadmill desks a couple of years ago from this New York Times story, I've been eager to try one. Because while I like walking, I always find it hard to carve out time for exercise. A tread-desk, it seemed, might magically solve my exercise scheduling prob. Except the appealing versions start at $4,400.

I kept hearing, though, that you could cobble one together for next to nothing. You just have to score a used treadmill and build some sort of desk on or above it. So when facing a lot of time working from home this summer, I decided to revisit the idea. Here's how I did it.

First, I researched used treadmills and learned that for walking, you can go with a relatively light-weight, cheap treadmill--even the kind that folds up, which I thought would be ideal, since this thing was going to be parked in our Brooklyn LIVING ROOM. I pictured something like a foldable bike. On Craigslist, I found a $100 used ProForm 365e, the kind that flattens like a Murphy bed.

Now, a friend had recently set up a tread-desk, and he reported that the hardest part was getting the used treadmill into his house. Thinking the folding kind would be easy to haul into to our third-floor walkup (perhaps it would come in a little box, and Tony could carry it single-handedly!), I cavalierly ignored the friend's comment, along with all of the CL posts that said, "Heavy! Two strong people needed to move this!" (Note that I am not strong and that my idea of strenuous exercise involves walking.)

We drove to the UWS one night a few weeks ago to pick up the old treadmill. It had little wheels and came out of a ground-floor apt, so while it wasn't exactly cute, it didn't seem too daunting either. I should probably have given pause when it turned out that in order to fit the treadmill into our Kia Soul, we had to push the front seats all the way forward. Tony, in fact, did seem concerned. But I just thought, "Well, this isn't the safest way to drive, but there's hardly any traffic at this hour!"

The full weight of the treadmill became obvious when we tried to slide it out of the car. No humans, treadmills or cars were harmed in the maneuver, which is a miracle. Indeed, nothing but divine assistance (and maybe Tony's patience and recent swim workouts) can account for our having then heaved the machine up three steep, narrow, twisting flights. It took about 40 really sweaty minutes, and I'm still haunted by how close we came to crushing my neck against the wall and flattening Tony altogether. All of which was before we got the treadmill to our apartment door, where it threatened to not fit through.

Suffice it to say that if your treadmill needs to get up stairs, I recommend hiring somebody with a van and a helper to pick up and deliver that puppy. It may double the cost of the project, but it'll be well worth it.

Now that I had my treadmill inside, I just needed to build platforms for the keyboard and monitor. No biggie! Except that I wanted the keyboard tray to be removable, so that I could still fold up the treadmill (remember: it's in our LIVING ROOM). And also: it turns out that most treadmills have horizontal arms on which you can rest a keyboard platform. Despite the recommendations of The $39 Treadmill site, I had blithely bought a device with curvy arms on which you could rest nothing--even after I'd removed the upper-body workout arms.

More research revealed that instead of building a desk onto the treadmill, I could build something around it, put that thing on casters and wheel it out of the way when I wanted to fold up the treadmill. While I would have preferred a sleeker, wall-mounted approach, I thought it best to start with the easiest solution possible. I drew a picture of a rudimentary desk, measured out the treadmill, and we headed over to Lowe's to get the pieces. They didn't have the casters, however, which were key to this project. But a guy who worked there (we actually found somebody!) was certain Ikea would have the right thing. We headed to Ikea to see if we could find the wheels before we bought anything else.

At Ikea, we found they didn't have the casters after all, so we did a deep dive on their desks, tables and counters...none of which seemed like they'd work. I was discouraged, and Tony was getting grouchy. But as we were walking out, we found the Broder shelving system. And it looked like it would do the trick. If we were willing to ignore the large signs that said never to use the T-foot supports with the 14" side-mount shelves intended for the L-foot supports. We were willing to risk it. We bought the shelving for $60 and picked up a couple of extension cords we needed, too.

We hit a few snags during setup--including a lack of proper hardware, because we were trying to use shelves that weren't set up for the system we'd bought--and at several points, it seemed like the shelving unit wouldn't fit over the treadmill properly. But Tony kept insisting it would work. And then suddenly, it all came together. On the back side of the unit, there's a sturdy, adjustable shelf for the monitor, lightly braced against the wall. On the front side, there's a sturdy, adjustable shelf for the keyboard/laptop, and it comes right off. Here, you can get a sense of how it plays in our LIVING ROOM; there are more shots on Flickr (note: much awesome background art is courtesy 20x200).

 
A few observations after about a week of use:

* This behemoth is in our LIVING ROOM. Weirdly, although esthetics are very important to me, I seem to be getting used to this. Somehow, the Broder shelving improves the look.

* I walk at .7 mile per hour, and I get in two to five miles a day. It's not a ton of walking, by any means, but I feel way, way less sedentary. And I notice that I'm more likely to do little things regularly, like walk to the printer, or run downstairs to get the mail. When I was sitting all day, I tended to stay on my ass.

* Learning to walk and type took about 10 seconds. I usually hop off for calls, however, and take a break or pace the apt because the noise of the treadmill motor can be distracting (otherwise, I don't notice it). Of note: when I stop treading, I usually feel very mildly dizzy for as much as 20 seconds. It's like getting too tipsy 10 times a day. I'm considering it a bonus.

* I don't get tired from walking, but my feet get sore if I walk barefoot all day. So I've taken to wearing Birkenstocks or "barefoot" sneakers with a Vibram sole and no socks (they're like the five-finger shoes, but the toes aren't separate).

* Too early to tell whether there will be any long-term benefits. I'll report back.

* Don't read this and think that you couldn't do the same thing. While I'm good at Craigslist and Ikea, I'm neither particularly atheltic nor handy. And though Tony was my secret weapon in getting the treadmill upstairs and insisting the Broder shelves would work, you could hire somebody to move the machine, and you could buy one of the many, many versions with horizontal arms, thus simplifying the desk construction immeasurably. Of course, you could also hire somebody to build the desk, which was my backup plan if the Ikea shelving hadn't worked. You'd still be ahead of the commercial tread-desks by about $4,000.

Snakes on a Plane

Just kidding!

I am no lightweight snake-o-phobe, and there was no fucking way I was going to see "Snakes on a Plane." In fact, 10 years ago, having blacked out more than once on the streets of New York after seeing people wearing snakes around their necks, I joined a study at Columbia Presbyterian to get six free sessions of desensitization therapy. It helped, but it didn't make the fear go away.

So I was plenty pleased when Tony found some other people with whom to see the movie last night, while I had a lovely dinner at Terzo with a new friend. This morning, I got the full rundown on "Snakes." T loved it. Apparently, the film was a tour de force of corniness, plus there was no stingy amount of gratuitous nudity. Other than hundreds of attack snakes pouring out of every vent and hole on screen, what's not to like?

Anyway, Tony wants me to make it known that he doesn't think his car is a piece of crap, as I do.

In other news, go Yanks!

Dryer Run

Earlier this summer, I realized that--hello!--our electric dryer is a big energy suck. So I bought a drying rack at Bed, Bath & Beyond for $9.99, and I've been air-drying about a quarter of our laundry. I've also been combining more loads.

Jury is still out on whether this change will cut our PG&E bills. And I'll probably never know how to account for the energy that went into creating, shipping and buying the drying rack (which was made in China under who-knows-what labor conditions). Bottom line: this may be little more than a feel-good action.